A conference like no other: Philosophical Perspectives On Peace

The conference was organized by the International Research Network Transcendental Philosophy/German Idealism at the Technical University of Berlin. It was run by academics: Sergueï Spetschinsky, a Belgian scholar from the Free University of Brussels, and Kai Gregor, a German scholar from the Technical University. There were scholars of philosophy from universities around the world, from India to the United States, Belgium to England and Spain to the Netherlands. Since the theme was peace within Turkey, Germany and Europe, there was a good deal of academics from Turkish and German academic institutions.

On the first day, Oct. 23, participants gathered to visit the remnants of the Berlin Wall and attend a performance lecture by Mariel Poppe at the Arttransponder gallery. A peace project involving artists and philosophers titled "Peace: Utopia or Real Space?" was organized by Tatjana Fell throughout the month of October, and many such performance lectures were held. A performance lecture is a curious thing where an artist, generally a visual or plastic artist, talks about the context in which s/he conceives her piece to be meaningful. Poppe, a sculptor, constructed a room of paravents, screens with cutouts of window patterns like those found in mosques. Her room is a see-through maze of paravents or, in another sense, windows that juxtapose the viewer against the viewed. Throughout her journeys to the Islamic world, from Morocco to Turkey, window patterns always fascinated her, a fascination which is expressed in her artwork now.

On the second day there were workshops on peace from several different perspectives. The first lecturer, Professor Raghunath Ghosh, was from the University of North Bengal in India. He talked on the Indian concept of peace, "shanti," and the theoretical perspective this provided on peace in Europe. Then, Professor Lucas Thorpe from Bilkent University discussed his paper titled "Liberalism, Peace and Islamic Fundamentalism: Can Liberals live peacefully with followers of Sayyid Qutb?" He compared Sayyid Qutb's ideas with the actions of Islamic fundamentalists and argued that because Sayyid Qutb perceives religion to be an individual matter between a person and God, his theoretical position could not provide a basis on which to justify the acts of al-Qaeda. Professor Egidius Berns, a Dutch emeritus professor from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, gave an interesting workshop on the flags of Europe and the Catholic symbolism of the immaculate conception of Mary. The last workshop of the day titled "Fethullah Gülen's 'schools of love': a model for the future?" by David Tittensor, an Australian scholar who is at Bilkent University on research grant from his home at the University of Melbourne, was particularly interesting.

The third day began with Sharon Anderson-Gold's workshop on a Kantian elaboration of the concept of hospitality, which emphasizes not only the host's but also the guests' responsibilities towards each other. Anderson-Gold teaches at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US and wrote a book on cosmopolitanism and another on the idea of unnecessary evil. The next lecture was from Onur Aktaş, a Turkish scholar from the Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ), who gave a workshop on a Nietzschean perspective of peace in which he proposed that the Nietzschean concept of the "will to know" could be the underlying motive behind integration, particularly political integration in Europe. Harry Lesser from the University of Manchester gave a lecture on "Peace, Hospitality and the Movement of Free Labor," which brought an interesting perspective to the issue of immigrant workers and labor rights. My lecture was on cosmoculturalism, which is a utopian political position that provides the theoretical justifications for learning about the culture of the other on an institutional level. All workshops, when closely observed, provided many theoretical solutions -- which should be take at face value -- to practical problems confronting the political agenda of Turkey, Germany and Europe, such as immigration, human rights, the free circulation of goods, religious fundamentalism, institutional stereotyping of the other, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as the legislative and political amendments needed to overcome these practical problems.